Search Results for: flower songs

Flowers are not natural — they are imaginary, and that is why they feel so gratifyingly real.  They do not exist as such but they provide a well-tempered vocabulary of affections that grow between us and those we grandly love.  … Continue reading →

Schubert’s “Die Blumensprache“/The Language of Flowers D519 (1818) is a song about flowers as a language — not as a repertoire of signs and symbols but as a system of signification.  As this video argues, flowers constitute a complex code. … Continue reading →

What if Don José returned her flower to Carmen, encouraging her to celebrate with her toreador his victory?  If Parsifal pushed Kundry into the magician’s arms?  If Butterfly kept her son and sent Pinkerton back to his American wife?  If … Continue reading →

A rose may convey things unsaid, such as Octavian’s love for Sophie in Rosenkavalier, or may ignore things said, such as the nightingale’s love for the flower in Britten’s song. “The nightingale and the rose” is the fourth song in … Continue reading →

If a listener manages to bracket its story and (re)create Der Rosenkavalier (prem. 1911) in purely musical terms, Richard Strauss’ “comedy for music” can turn into an intoxicating experience.  Its plot is then constituted not by Hofmannsthal’s imperial nostalgia for … Continue reading →

Is Madama Butterfly (1904) colonialist, mythological, camp, or something else?  Should it be discussed in a political, tragic, performative, or (say) feminist frame of reference?  Does the leading role of this tragedia giapponese call for a geisha, gaia, gay, or … Continue reading →

Few are the temptresses who smoke in a public square in Seville (in Carmen) or dance in a magic garden facing Seville (that is, Moorish Spain, in Parsifal) and seduce men with flowers in exchange for their freedom.  Most women … Continue reading →

Here is a great challenge for the sociology of music:  What gives a pop song cultural currency and social authority?  In other words, what might Adorno learn from Abba? This challenge becomes particularly pronounced in the case of songs to … Continue reading →

Friedrich Nietzsche tried to show the world that he could defy the friendship of his “other self,” Richard Wagner, by declaring his own irreverent preference for Don José’s lust over Parsifal’s abstinence, by proclaiming the spell of the bullfight mightier … Continue reading →